Mona Hatoum: A look at general politics in detail

Mona Hatoum and the airy heights of the art world

Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, Lebanon , in 1952. She was the child of Palestinian parents who lived in Israel but had fled to Lebanon in 1948 due to the war that preceded the establishment of the State of Israel. Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Israel – Mona Hatoum was born into the heart of a Middle East conflict that, at the time of her birth, was already several decades old.

The Middle East conflict was to become even longer, and Mona Hatoum (in its manifestation as the "Civil War in Lebanon," 1975) was forced to leave her "homeland of exile" at a young age for a life in the West (London). With brief interruptions—around the turn of the millennium, about a dozen peace initiatives gave rise to hopes for a resolution to the conflict-ridden Middle East, hopes that were quickly dashed by three wars in the Gaza Strip since 2008—the unrest in Mona Hatoum's birthplace continues to this day.

To this day, art history, with similarly short interruptions, attempts to force the artist and her work into a meaningful context with the Middle East conflict; typical headlines/first lines of publications about Mona Hatoum read “Mona Hatoum: a woman, a Palestinian, a native of Beirut” , “Lebanese-born artist, Mona Hatoum” , “Hatoum was born into a family of Palestinian refugees” , “Lebanese-born artist, Mona Hatoum” , and so on.

Mona Hatoum is rather annoyed by these persistent and insistent efforts. The artist defines herself as a Palestinian-British artist ; Lebanon is simply the country where she grew up, and nothing more. Hatoum has lived outside the conflict zone since she was 23, primarily in London and for the past few years also in Berlin, and her art is more global in scope than focused on the Middle East conflict .

It is fitting that Mona Hatoum ranks very high in the world art ranking (determined by an artist's public presence, exhibitions + sales); currently at number 41.

Mona Hatoum has been considered one of the world's leading artists for quite some time, and she has been among the 50 best "artists in the world" for over a decade. Her ranking has fluctuated slightly depending on her activity and public success – 30th in 2005, 45th in 2007, 35th in 2010, 47th in 2012, 41st in 2013, 44th, 45th, and 41st in 2016 – but she has always maintained a high level of recognition within the art world.

Every connoisseur knows this Hatoum work: Mona Hatoum's "Mud Battle"

One of her most important works of art was presented by Mona Hatoum immediately after completing her studies at the Slade School of Art in 1982: the performance “Under Siege” , in which Mona Hatoum found an equally impressive and insightful symbolism for the helplessness of the individual in the face of warmongers and the events of war:

Hatoum battles for seven hours with clayey mud, masses that creep forward and back with equal regularity, just as they are pushed back slightly. Here is a sketch of the performance's setup:

reactfeminism.org.

Their battle takes place inside a transparent cube. Just like the innocent civilian population threatened in today's wars, with a view of peaceful areas but no chance of ever reaching them. The viewer, too, is trapped in the role of a helpless witness, unable to influence the situation.

Thirty-four years later, in 2016, a highly topical performance for all those affected by the grotesque failure of modern civil societies. Or those not yet affected, but whose growing horror at current developments has already robbed them of their sleep.

Hatoum's statements in the accompanying letter to the performance are a highly topical statement on the "refugee crisis" of our time :

Many of Mona Hatoum's artworks make similarly decisive statements: against war, oppression, and deceit, and in favor of humanity. Some of these artworks will be briefly introduced shortly, but as always, embarking on a journey of self-discovery is absolutely worthwhile.

Mona Hatoum's training as an artist: Life in exile, art instead of war

Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut in 1952, grew up there and graduated from Beirut University College in 1972.

Mona Hatoum is said to have shown an interest in art and artistic creation as a young woman, but found no support in her family. It is known that Hatoum spent her childhood drawing; every school notebook, from poetry books to scientific notes, was decorated and illustrated with drawings.

While traveling in London in 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon. Her route home was blocked overnight, so Mona Hatoum stayed in London and began to seriously engage with art and “learning art”: From 1975 to 1979, she took courses at the Byam Shaw School of Art, an independent art school founded in 1910 (which merged into Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design at the University of the Arts London in 2003).

From 1979 to 1981, Hatoum completed her artistic training at the Slade School of Art , the art school of University College London and one of the most prestigious art schools in Britain. The Slade School of Art is also internationally recognized as a leader, and its alumni include artists of the caliber of Douglas Gordon, Richard Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, and Derek Jarman, as well as prominent figures in art-related professions such as interior designer Eileen Gray, MoMA co-founder Mary Quinn Sullivan, and art historian John Richardson.

Visit to the artist's studio

While still a student in 1981, Hatoum staged her first performance , “Look No Body!” , in which she transformed her thoughts on publicly accepted and unacceptable bodily orifices into a small toilet show: The audience watched Hatoum on a monitor as she (repeatedly) used a camera-equipped toilet, while being informed via audio recording about the scientific details of urination. There was plenty of water to drink for Hatoum and the audience; whether toilets were also provided for the audience is not recorded.

In 1982 came the eternal mudslinging match “Under Siege”, which made Mona Hatoum famous almost overnight.

Recent works

Clear messages: Through body language, gestures, composition, and film

After Mona Hatoum had gained the attention of the avant-garde art world with “Under Siege” , she addressed this enlightened and largely pacifist avant-garde in a targeted and rapid succession manner with her messages:

In 1983, the artist presented herself in the “Negotiating Table Performance,” bloodstained and covered with entrails, for hours on an imaginary negotiating table. The performance took place in a darkened room, illuminated by only a single lightbulb. In the background, news reports about the Lebanese Civil War and peace speeches by political leaders of the West—the very West that had caused the conflict yet remained largely uninvolved—revealed the hypocrisy typically inherent in such negotiations.

“So Much I Want to Say” from 1983 is a short black and white video with individual still images of a woman’s face, from whose covered mouth the phrase “So Much I Want to Say” constantly spills.

Between 1980 and 1988, Mona Hatoum had much more to say, conveyed in approximately 35 performances. She performed entirely in the classical tradition: her performances were non-archivable, momentary events, designed for direct communication with the audience, always of a very different nature. Complete video recordings are not always available; often, posterity can only reconstruct the events through descriptions, sketches, and individual images.

Sculptures, videos and room-filling installations were added in the late 1980s:

In the video “Measures of Distance”, Mona Hatoum shows still images of her mother in 1988 (in the shower, including advertising-friendly breasts), superimposed with the Arabic script of a mother's letter, which the artist reads aloud in Arabic and in English translation.

The casual viewer sees the video as a processing of Hatoum's lonely early days in London: a young woman completely alone in a partly contrasting new cultural environment, while her family is far away in a country at war and in mortal danger. This interpretation is almost unanimously accepted by art historians.

However, it is not considered exhaustive. If you enjoy reading lengthy scholarly discussions that interpret the theoretical and practical background of a work of art down to the last possible (im)consensus, then the scholarly literature on “Measures of Distance” is recommended.

It's all there: references to the artist's biography, family ties, distance and intimacy, female sexuality, mother-daughter and father-daughter relationships, and father-mother relationships (sorry, mother-father relationships), and while we're on the subject, feminism ; color theories about the representation and coloring of water (shower); war history and a critique of an encouraging coping psychology; psychology regarding the symbolic value of shower images as placeholders for armed conflicts; Arabic letters as barbed wire that holds the woman captive in the shower (Hatoum Mother)...

In 1994, the room-filling installation “Moutons” . For this piece, the artist spent six years collecting her hair daily from a brush, rolling it up, and storing it in a cardboard box until she had amassed the 145 hair balls required for the installation. One collector commented on this artwork: “I see it as the religious chastisement of women, a farewell to the right to be a woman .

Also in 1994, for the video installation “Corps Etranger”, first her body surface and then her body orifices, including from the inside. At that time, such film footage could still attract attention at the Venice Biennale (1995), and the video installation even earned her a nomination for the Turner Prize , the most prestigious art prize in Great Britain.

A little later, Hatoum was able to use individual shots from “Corps Etranger” for another work of art, namely her commentary on what is probably the most famous pornographic film of all time, “Deep Throat” from 1972: In Mona Hatoum’s “Deep Throat ” from 1996, the insatiable, greedy throat has already worked off the passion for and during sex and earned enough money to indulge the greed by eating in fine restaurants.

Mona Hatoum has thus dealt with the physical aspects for now and turns her attention to her immediate surroundings:

1996 with the sculpture “Divan Bed” , in which softness only appears soft and reality is very hard; 1998 with the (untitled) wheelchair, a wheelchair made of steel with handles in the shape of knives.

In 1999, the room-filling installation “Home” , which shows Hatoum’s excellent instinct for the development of things: Around the turn of the millennium, the kitchen was still a place of security, but Mona Hatoum already presented the kitchen at that time as precisely the environmentally polluting and acutely life-threatening collection of electronic waste that many of our kitchens have become in recent years.

From here on, there is much for you to discover, including “Hot Spots” (2009) and “Natura morta” (2012), and the importance of looking closely, nodding in recognition, and thinking, “How right she is! ”

Mona Hatoum throughout the world, to this day

To date (July 2016), Mona Hatoum's works have been shown in over 70 solo exhibitions and an incredible 600 group exhibitions (approx.); most of them in the USA (125), followed by Germany (88), Great Britain (75), France (51) and Italy (50).

Mona Hatoum can look back on an impressive number of awards and prizes :

• 1990-1993: Member of the Artists' Film and Video Committee of the Arts Council of England
• 1995: Nomination for the Turner Prize
• 1997: Honorary membership of Dartington College of Arts, Devon (England)
• 1998: Awarded the title of Visiting Professor at Chelsea College and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London
• 2000: George Maciunas Prize of the City of Wiesbaden
• 2004: Roswitha Haftmann Prize of the foundation of the same name in Zurich
• 2004: Sonning Prize of the University of Copenhagen
• 2007: Scholarship recipient at Dartington College of Arts
• 2008: Bellagio Creative Artist Fellowship, London
• 2008: Honorary doctorate from the American University of Beirut
• 2008: Rolf Schock Prize, Stockholm
• 2010: Appointment to the Academy of Arts, Berlin
• 2010: Käthe Kollwitz Prize
• 2012: Joan Miró Prize of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona for “her great ability to combine personal experience with universal values”

Mona Hatoum currently lives in London and Berlin. In Berlin, she is represented by Galerie Max Hetzler , in London by Galerie White Cube , and you can find out more about her current solo exhibition at Tate Modern tate.org.uk.

Currently, art by Mona Hatoum can be seen in seven exhibitions in five countries :

• until August 14, 2016 “Imperfect Chronology: Mapping the Contemporary I”, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
• until August 21, 2016 “Mona Hatoum”, Tate Modern, London
• until August 28, 2016 “Connected”, CENTRALE for contemporary art, Brussels, Belgium
• until September 18, 2016 “Invisible Adversaries: Marieluise Hessel Collection”, Hessel Museum of Art & Center for Curatorial Studies Galleries at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA
• until September 25, 2016 “THE 1980S, Today,s Beginnings?”, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands
• until September 25, 2016 “Seeing Round Corners: The Art of the Circle”, Turner Contemporary, Margate, Kent, UK
• Until October 23, 2016: “The Dark Side of the Moon. The Abysmal in Art from Albrecht Dürer to Martin Disler”, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, St. Gallen

46 public collections preserve Mona Hatoum's work for the future and for every citizen:

• Australia: Queensland Art Gallery – Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane QLD
• Belgium: Frédéric de Goldschmidt Collection Brussels
• Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebæk, ARKEN Museum for Modern Art Ishoj
• Germany: Ludwig Forum for International Art Aachen, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Goetz Collection Munich
• France: FRAC Picardy Amiens, FRAC des Pays de la Loire Carquefou, Fondation Louis Vuitton Paris, Fondation Francès Senlis
• Greece: National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens
• Israel: The Israel Museum Jerusalem
• Japan: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa
• Canada: The Banff Center Walter Phillips Gallery Banff AB, National Gallery of Canada Musée des beaux-arts du Canada Ottawa ON, Art Gallery of Ontario Toronto ON, Vancouver Art Gallery Vancouver BC
• Mexico: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca
• Netherlands: De Vleeshal Middelburg
• Norway: Astrup Fearnley Museet for Modern Art Oslo
• Palestinian Territories: Birzeit University Museum, Birzeit West Bank
• Portugal: Ellipse Foundation Alcoitão
• Spain: Centro de Artes Visuales Helga de Alvear Cáceres, Fundación Telefónica Madrid, DA2 Domus Artium 2002 Salamanca, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea Santiago de Compostela
• Sweden: Magasin 3 Stockholm, Kunsthalle Stockholm
• USA: Hessel Museum of Art & Center for Curatorial Studies Galleries at Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson NY, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Boston MA, Museum of Fine Arts Boston MA, Albright-Knox Art Gallery Buffalo NY, The Warehouse Dallas TX, Sheldon Museum of Art Lincoln NE, Los Angeles County Museum of Art + MOCA Grand Avenue Los Angeles CA, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Miami FL, Museum of Modern Art New York City NY, The Fabric Workshop and Museum Philadelphia PA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art San Francisco CA, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Washington DC
• United Kingdom: Tate Liverpool, The David Roberts Art Foundation + Tate Britain + The Arts Gallery University of The Arts London, Manchester Art Gallery

Mona Hatoum's art as an inspiring glimpse into the future

Mona Hatoum creates art by specifically incorporating her body , which is used as an instrument of clarification without any voyeuristic attitude: Hatoum shows on her (own) body how institutional violence affects people.

Especially with “Look No Body!” , “Under Siege” , “So Much I Want to Say” , “Corps Etranger” and “Deep Throat”, she has created works that do not allow the viewer to retreat into (limited) purely intellectual reception, but inescapably involve him emotionally.

Mona Hatoum's works have a distinct political dimension , which is why her art is very often and repeatedly reduced "art of the Arab-Israeli conflict"

Unjustly so, as the artist repeatedly emphasizes in interviews. Mona Hatoum's art is inherently political. Her background and the circumstances of her birth prevented her from ever slipping into the "we're all doing fine, and those who aren't doing well we won't see until it's our turn" mentality, which has already caused the death of some democracies (and is currently producing some truly frightening results in the Western world).

Mona Hatoum does not limit her statement to “national political Palestinianism” or “national political English views” or any views of any politically active groups, but is political without being partisan.

Hatoum always focuses on those who matter: the people, the citizens of states, who are responsible for shaping peaceful civil societies. He shows people where they can and must act (“Measures of Distance” and the migrations of this world) and where they are so powerless that they must act to once again become the agents of the democratic decisions made by their representatives (“The Negotiating Table” and the wars of this world).

Typical of her work is the recurring hidden ambiguity, which, for example, points to hidden power being exercised over people, as in “Home” (by an electronics industry that is more committed to profit than to the production of safe and useful products).

In “Divan Bed”, the supposedly comfortable form is in reality a harsh threat to the buyer; the “Untitled (wheelchair)” actually harms the person in need of assistance instead of supporting them (an experience many chronically ill people dependent on aids have to deal with in our healthcare systems; one only needs to replace the knife-like armrests with the many aids that are approved too late and then counterproductive); in Natura morta, the supposedly decorative contents of the cabinet, upon closer inspection of the “decoration”, turn out to be a deadly threat…

Mona Hatoum's work presents ideas in several directions on how people can deal with the madness in the world:

The first step is the straightforward depiction of deceptive politicians, parasitic corporations, and products (and, unfortunately, in many parts of the world, also of horrific things), by everyone for everyone. This involves clearly naming the deception, the refusal to work, and the failure to provide assistance, and avoids the detached approach of the "I'm-just-reporting" journalism that is currently gaining ground.

German journalism, for example, has been asleep since at least the turn of the millennium, overlooking the fact that in its very core area of ​​work—media-mediated reporting—a new medium has emerged with the worldwide internet, to which, in principle, everyone has access.

Every citizen who reports on the news has been and continues to be seen by many press companies as competition, and their competence to report on their own immediate living environment is denied in the most contemptuous way possible.

Instead of rejoicing at the revolutionary new opportunities for “informing the world”, we should immediately set about inventing a variety of new formats in which citizens can support the media in reporting on the world…

Intelligent citizens eventually resent being treated like fools or being treated as fools. Intelligent citizens even realize that, in reality, it's the media conglomerates that are the fools, or rather, the reactionary guardians of the power to report and interpret world news – knowledge for their own gain, not for sharing, but for making money.

Informed citizens have turned away from this backward-looking, profit-maximizing media power (these were the subscribers), numerous press publications stumbled, with mass layoffs of journalists usually being the first countermeasure, and reporting from the threatened "still-job" is not improved by this... But the articles of the "I-report-neutrally" journalists are increasing dramatically, who, despite their constant appeal to the one true, opinion-free journalism, are unmasked by the reader for what they are: bows to the "market-imposed" castration of journalism or capitulations to the diversity and complexity of our world.

For true journalism may sometimes involve sensible limitations, but certainly not the refusal to take any kind of responsibility for one's own writing.

For journalists who practice their profession at a high (moral) level and do not only have profit maximization in mind, it is still a matter of course that they take a stand in their articles on the topics they report on (this is, incidentally, the reason for a public fee for radio and television; a large proportion of journalists with such a professional attitude work in public broadcasting corporations).

If journalists increasingly stop reporting and simply hold up the camera without comment (which, by deciding where to hold the camera, is itself a statement), journalists make themselves superfluous – anyone who owns a camera can hold up a camera.

Mona Hatoum did not fall into this trap of “mere representation”; on the contrary, she consciously focuses her processing of reality through her art on the individual person, on the vulnerable individual and the individual who wounds others through their actions or (omitted) decisions…

By highlighting the vulnerability of the body , of every single body, Hatoum brings the violence from the command centers and negotiating tables of unharmed (and emotionally uninvolved) war administrators and profiteers directly into the real world of individual people.

These are the people who suffer in every armed conflict:
dozens of people (33 girls from a kidnapped school class),
hundreds of people (454 residents of the village accidentally bombed into the ground),
thousands of people (6565 victims among the innocent civilian population),
millions of people.

The 20th century alone produced between 100 and 185 million war victims , and this includes roughly two to three times that number of war-traumatized relatives with long-term consequences who carry the war into the next generations – Mona Hatoum reminds us of this, of every past victim and every future victim.

And she reminds us that it's time for each of us to get involved again. Against the oppressors, the brazenly stupid troublemakers, the even stupider racists (we all belong to a species of Homo sapiens that is genetically much more closely related to each other than is usual among species in our fauna).

For those fellow human beings who are currently war in their homeland ; and who are seeking refuge today in places where, in the future, people will again have to flee oppression, war, and terror, or where civil societies have already come together that will no longer allow a relapse into inhumane times…